Dungeons sizes

[Dice4Hire]

I find it hard to stat out or run a large dungeon (for me 8+ rooms) so most of my dungeons tend to be about 5-6 rooms, (not including other areas not for encounters.

The days of endless dungeons are gone for me.

I agree that 4E does not seem to be well-suited for dungeon exploring. The earlier editions were far better.

 

[Haltherrion]

*I would posit though that these real life dungeons are more often Level 1 dungeons connected together, rather than the stereotypical Level 1 on top of Level 2, on top of Level 3... with increasiing dangerous critters inside (in fact real life dungeons seem devoid of orcs, green slimes, and mimcs) or even traps and treasure.

That's potentially a whole new thread

I long ago abandoned the "deeper is harder" trope. There's also the issue of critter density in a dungeon and what is sensible which I guess ties back to size: classic dungeons often had a lot of creatures living in close proximity willing to devour/attack adventurers but oddly, not messing with each other.

One way to deal with that is size: a very large dungeon doesn't need the things living so close together. Take the Nuremberg cellars as an example. They are in clusters of rooms, each maybe 30-40,000 square feet connected by passages. Each cluster could be its own critter domain with its own surface access, plus some of the out of the way places might be trapped tombs, undead haunts etc. Now for your 200,000 sq ft of dungeon you could have 5 or so "themed" areas (the goblin's lair, the bandits lair) plus another 5-15 "spots of interest" without having the density seem to preposterous.

Of course, you could also just have 5 separate dungeons I tend to the latter (smaller) approach but it is interesting to see physical, real world examples that are large.

 

[billd91]

Speaking of catacombs and tunnels under cities, there was a recent National Geographic magazine on the mines underneath Paris. Another good source of inspiration.

 

[wingsandsword]

I've traditionally not worried about dungeon sizes.

It's a lot easier to have large-scale excavation in a D&D world than a no-magic historic world.

Rock-to-Mud spells, Disintegrate spells, Charmed burrowing creatures like Umber Hulks, or advanced Dwarven engineering you can do a lot more than a typical medieval culture, not to mention how large real-world cave systems can be (Mammoth Cave, here in KY, is the largest cave system in the world, and it is definitely an all-day thing just to see some of the smaller cave complexes that are tourist-friendly, to say nothing of the larger expanses of caves). Also knowing the huge size of the actual catacombs beneath Rome and Paris (having seen them on a High School tour of Europe back in the 90's), and knowing that a D&D world can have them even larger, I feel nothing wrong with making a dungeon as large as I can draw it and as large as the PC's can make it.

 

[The Shaman]

I long ago abandoned the "deeper is harder" trope.

In my megadungeon daydreaming I dealt with this as well.

The dungeon is a necropolis for interring the sorcerer-priests of a long-destroyed city-state. The upper levels represent the nascent city-state, shortly after the first sorcerer-priest took control. As they grew in power, the necropolis was dug deeper, and those interred there were more powerful, and more evil, so the monster level of undead and tomb guardians, the complexity of traps, the incidence of magical traps, and so on increase the deeper the adventurers explore.

By the time the adventurers reach the lowest levels, they are dealing with the tombs of magical rulers of a powerful empire.

So 'deeper is harder' is consistent with the backstory of the megadungeon.

 

[nnms]

When i run 4E in normal mode, I keep the dungeons pretty small. The group in my current campaign is pushing paragon tier and going into dungeons has been happening less and less.

But in my secondary FourthCore hard mode 4E game, the dungeon has one size: infinite. It's a campaign dungeon which is it's own plane. There are levels above and below the starting level and the further you go from the entrance, either up levels or down, the worse it gets. The monsters aren't there as a result of natural selection or the product of a developing ecosystem. The whole plane is a malevolent dream state intelligence and the further you get from the magically protected entrance, the closer you get to the heart of pure evil. So the monsters that are manifested there are much, much nastier.

The game is also incredibly mission/quest oriented, so it's not just about random dungeon crawling for it's own sake. The party is looking for something in particular each time they go there.

Either way, large or small, easy mode or hard mode, my dungeons are thoroughly "Jaquayed":

The Alexandrian - Archive
The Alexandrian - Archive
The Alexandrian - Archive
The Alexandrian - Archive
The Alexandrian - Archive
The Alexandrian - Archive

Not everything on that blog is necessarily good, but that article series was awesome.